Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium

Small is Beautiful
the design of Lua

Roberto Ierusalimschy
PUC-Rio, Brazil

About the talk:

The design of a programming language,
as that of any other artifact,
entails many tradeoffs involving conflicting requirements.
Among these requirements,
simplicity and smallness are somewhat special,
because they conflict with almost any other desirable feature
and because these conflicts cannot be solved by adding complexity.

Along the years,
the design of the Lua programming language has kept simplicity
and smallness among its main goals,
within the restraints of a language with a large installed user base.
In this talk we will discuss the design of Lua,
emphasizing the choices and tradeoffs involved
in keeping the language simple and small.

Roberto Ierusalimschy is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at PUC-Rio (the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro), where he works with programming-language design and implementation. He is the leading architect of the Lua programming language and the author of the book "Programming in Lua".